Violinists having a challenge picking up mandolin

[Jim MacDaniel]

While doing some surfing I happened upon this thread at violinist.com, which reminded me of previous threads read here that discussed the challenges faced by mandolinists picking up fiddle or violin. While it seems that both forums' discussion agree that learning proper use of a bow may still be more challenging than using a plectrum, both sets of musicians (us and them appear to find similar challenges in that they had to learn entirely new left and right hand techniques. Also interesting was one poster's comment there which mentioned that they challenged themself to learn to "think" in chords.

Of you mandolinist/fiddlers or mandolinist/violinists here on the boards, which instrument did you learn first, and how long did it take you to become at least comfortable with your new instrument? Also, since mandolinists already "think" in in terms of chords and doublestops, as well as in melody, might that have been a factor in the ease or difficulty in learning your newer instrument?

[jtauxe]

I started off with six years of classical violin training unapologetically crammed down my throat as a kid. It was not a happy time, but I did learn a lot of theory (e.g. where the notes are and playing in different keys) and technique (e.g. positions) that has transferred well to mandolin. "Improvisation" was something that I had never heard of or even knew was possible, on the violin, however.

Then came a day that I remember well. I was sitting around the neighborhood shop (Fretted Instruments, of Homewood, AL) waiting for my banjo lesson (from Herb Trotman, the World's Meanest Banjo Teacher - not) when I looked up and saw this funny-looking instrument on the wall. Four double courses of strings, what the heck is that? I picked it up, and OMG, I already knew where all the notes were! It was love at first note, and the mandolin has been my main instrument ever since. It took me ten years to even pick up the violin again (and we have made up since then).

The transfer went easily for melodic stuff, but I had to figure out the chords from first principles. The music theory paid off big time, and I have come up with a chord system that I really enjoy, even though no one else seems to know what I am doing. Having never used a mandolin book, I was free to develop them in my own way, though I do not expect it is truly unique.

[ApK]

My first instrument is guitar.
From there I tried fiddle, and am slowly progressing.
I didn't find the bow as inherently intimidating as some people seem to, so either I'm lucky in that, or I simply haven't gotten to the hard stuff yet.
I then picked up a mando, and, from a single-note melody POV, find it a nice, easy-to-use, instrument to play fiddle tunes on.
I still can't quite get that tremolo going, and I really haven't tried much more than 2-finger chords (though I'll start playing with that 3-note chord chart that was posted here recently).
I'm figuring that if I hadn't started with guitar, where it took me longer to learn to keep a pick in my hand and to hit the string I was aiming for then it did for me to get comfortable playing "taters" with a bow, then the even basic mando right hand stuff would have been harder for me than bowing has so far.

ApK

[farmerjones]

i picked up a mandolin about a week after the fiddle. And i still love both. But the truth of it is, i felt like i had to serve one master. The fiddle seemed harder so being the masicist(sp?) i went with the fiddle. They compliment each other, but i'll say i dought if i'll ever learn my closed chords on a mando. I love to play fiddle tunes on a mandolin, but i don't think that's enough to call myself a player. I've played banjo and guitar for twenty years. Only played fiddle and mandolin since '03. i get asked to play somewhere every weekend, but i'll be the first to tell you i'm not much on anything.

[MikeEdgerton]

I started off with six years of classical violin training unapologetically crammed down my throat as a kid.

I'll be honest, I envy you. I wish my parents had been that mean.

[Clamdigger]

I have been playing the mandolin for about six years and this past June I started to play the fiddle. I find it much harder than the mandolin. It is tuned the same which makes finding the notes easier but no frets sure makes things more difficult. If you are a sixteenth off the note is sharp or flat. The bowing is the toughest part. I am staring to get it but just in case, the mandolin is never far away. Clamdigger

[Ken Sager]

I came from years of playing violin as a kid, too, but I was lucky that my parents also let me take guitar lessons at the same time. Chords, using a pick, melodic single-note playing, it was second nature before I was 12.

I just wish I had kept playing the violin... Bowing now feels like speaking a foreign language I never learned. It definitely helped me take up the mandolin years later.

Best,
Ken

[jmcgann]

Good thread. Just because 12 zillion guitarists can play with a pick doesn't mean it's an easy transition from the bow to the pick.

I taught a "Mandolin for Non- mandolin principals" lab at Berklee. It was amazing how very good fiddlers struggled with the pick.

Don't take your skills for granted, O denizens of the mando!

[Alex Fields]

I'll be honest, I envy you. I wish my parents had been that mean.

Yeah, no kidding. I mean I started taking fiddle lessons in elementary school (I was like nine or ten), but it was my choice, they got my a violin and lessons because I said I really wanted them. I wish they had started me as soon as I was physically able to play a violin or a piano or whatever. And made me practice a lot no matter how much I complained. I may have resented it but at least I would have had that head start which usually seems to make the difference between a really good musician and a virtuoso. Fortunately I have a lot of natural ability and intelligence for things like music, but still.

I taught a "Mandolin for Non- mandolin principals" lab at Berklee. It was amazing how very good fiddlers struggled with the pick.

I second that. I have several times been in the position of trying to teach bowed instrument players to flatpick and they always find it just about impossible. That may be partly due to poor teaching skills on my part but I hardly think that's the whole story. More realistically I think it's that flatpicking is just as difficult to learn as bowing. I learned fiddle first and still found it more difficult to learn to pick. It's also worth noting that there a way higher portion of fiddle/violin players have good bowing technique that mandolin/guitar players have good (lead) flatpicking technique. The problem is that when you watch someone good at flatpicking, it tends to look pretty simple and straightforward, just up and down a lot of the time, and when you watch someone bowing, it looks very complex and daunting, so the natural assumption to make is that picking is a lot easier. But I think that's just false. It may tend to be simpler than bowing in the sense that there is less going on, but simpler does not equal easier. It seems to be a lot harder to get to a proficient level with a pick, IMO. And even simpler isn't always true, look at someone like Evan Marshall or Radim Zenkl and tell me there is anything simple or easy looking about their right hand technique.

Good thread. Just because 12 zillion guitarists can play with a pick doesn't mean it's an easy transition from the bow to the pick.

Define "play with a pick." It's a rare acoustic guitarist who can flatpick lead very well. Most of them (actually, the vast majority of them) just strum chords and occasionally play a half-*ssed lead. And it is way easier to play a passable solo on an electric guitar than on a mandolin or even an acoustic guitar.

[Zako]

I forced my parents...

[Bertram Henze]

I started off with six years of classical violin training unapologetically crammed down my throat as a kid.

Yeah, I know oh-so-well what you mean... It was nine years for me, just imagine that. My parents were both classical musicians, unable to take any non-classical music seriously.

Just like you, I found a mandolin hanging in a shop, discovered the familiar tuning, it was like coming home, you guess the rest.

I never got back to reconcile my relationship with the violin - I still hate it.

However, the violin was not my first instrument. In elementary school, a teacher of mine was fond of renaissance instruments and organized a small orchestra of recorders, medieval-looking fiddles (held upright like a cello sitting on your knee) and oblong rectangular three-stringed fretted blocks called "Schmalzither" (which literally means narrow cittern), which remotely resembled mountain dulcimers - I played one of those. Thus the seed of frets was sown in my heart early.

Bertram

[Lee Callicutt]

That avatar Rules!

[Bertram Henze]

Sorry, didn't see that - now I see better...

[Alex Orr]

Good thread. Just because 12 zillion guitarists can play with a pick doesn't mean it's an easy transition from the bow to the pick...

It was amazing how very good fiddlers struggled with the pick.

This is true. #

My sister was a classical suzuki violinist from about age seven through the end of high school, about a decade. #She doesn't play as much nowadays, but she's still a much better sight reader than I am. #She can pick up my mandolin and pluck out tunes from sheet music pretty quickly, but she can only do it with her thumb, and chords just don't make any sense at all to her. #I've tried to explain to her how to use a pick, but when she tries to use it...well, it looks awkward from the moment she picks the thing up. # #

Of course the corollary to this is that whenever I've tried to play her violin, the bow feels like the most awkward thing in the world...and we shouldn't even talk about the horrific noises I am capable of making with that thing

Thinking back to when I started playing guitar, using a pick has never once seemed awkward or uncomfortable. #About three years ago, I finally took the plunge and decided I wanted to start learning how to play fingerstyle guitar...man, that was akward. #Same instrument, but I felt like a total clod at first. #It took many months (hell, about a year really) of dedicated practice for me to get to the point where now it feels completely normal. #And of course the corolary to this is that I've met many fantastic fingerpickers, much better than me, who simply can't stand using a pick. #Just the attempt to strum some open chords with a pick looks really clumsy and uncomfortable. #One time I was talking about this same subject with an amazing fingerpicker who told me that he had never once been able to make it through a whole song using a pick - he could never keep a solid rythm and the pick would inevitably fall out of his hand. #

It is interesting, as stringed instrument players, what our non-fretting hands gravitate towards, and recoil from, in terms of playing.

[Andrew Faltesek]

My daughter, who plays classical violin beautifully; reports as well that using the plectrum is "hard" for her, and also that frets REALLY throw her off. When I first got the mando I figured she would be a natural with it! She has begun to play some fiddle style music in the last few years, and I hope she will get the mando bug despite any difficulties.

[Red Henry]

One little-known fact in the fiddle/mandolin world is that Kenny Baker is a pretty good mandolin player-- so good, in fact, that at one time there was a proposal for him to make a mandolin album. He used to say that he'd work out a tune on the mandolin to define the notes, then transfer it to the fiddle.
Kenny sure had no trouble with the flatpick (he's a good guitar player, too).

[Joel Glassman]

>Also, since mandolinists already "think" in in terms of chords and doublestops,
>as well as in melody, might that have been a factor in the ease or difficulty in
>learning your newer instrument?

A slight change of topic...
After learning mandolin as a violin player,
The most important gain was learning to recognize chord/arpeggio
shapes on the violin, which made for a big improvement in improvising.
This makes it possible to visualize the notes available with the change
of chords. Before learning "chord movement", there was a lot of searching
around for a good note (and I hear many violin players doing the same).
I think the most important issue in moving to violin or mandolin is to learn
bowing or picking in a highly disciplined way, with a teacher. I don't
think there is really another way, if you are serious about it.

[Red Henry]

Good points about the difficulty of crossing over. And after technique, another significant issue is style: Not so many fiddle-plus-mandolin players seem to separate the two-- that is, to play mandolin on the mandolin, and fiddle on the fiddle. More often, those who start on the fiddle (or start both at about the same time) seem to still be looking for a fiddle sound when they play mandolin.

To my ear, two people who do play each instrument in its own style (and very well, of course) are Rhonda Vincent and Ricky Skaggs. Another, with a bit more fiddle influence in his mandolin playing but a mandolin intensity matched by few anywhere, is Sam Bush. I think that the great players have a natural instinct for what to play on each instrument.

[jtauxe]

I started off with six years of classical violin training unapologetically crammed down my throat as a kid.

I'll be honest, I envy you. I wish my parents had been that mean.

Well, all is appreciated and forgiven now, decades later. Nevertheless, I let my kids study what they want in music, without cajoling or intimidation.

[skydog]

Red says: "More often, those who start on the fiddle (or start both at about the same time) seem to still be looking for a fiddle sound when they play mandolin."

Which is funny, because I started on mandolin and I'm looking to find sort of a fiddle sound on it! Wouldn't you say that's kinda what Mr. Monroe did, wantin' to play fiddle and all like Uncle Pen?

(Then again, I can't get a fiddle sound out of a fiddle either, so who am I kidding?)

Your former student at the first Owensboro Monroe workshop just sayin 'howdy',
Duane

[Red Henry]

Hi, Duane-- Thanks for the post. I think I know what you mean about fiddle influence, because I have always felt it in my own playing.
I think that Bill did often look for a sound that was fiddle-influenced, but he pursued it by playing the tune's sound as he heard it, which did not always mean playing many of the same notes as the fiddle would play. In other words, he expressed a fiddle tune not using the whole fiddle melody, but using mandolin-fingerboard notes accessible to his fingers and brain.
I hear Doc Watson doing the same thing on guitar: on a fiddle tune he uses a good many of the fiddle notes, and always expresses the tune very well, but he plays the tune as a guitar piece, taking advantage of the guitar's strengths and using expressive licks available to him on the guitar fingerboard.

More Monroe trivia: Kenny Baker once said that Bill would have been a hell of a fiddler, if he'd played that instrument.

[mythicfish]

There is nothing inherently difficult or easy in learning to play any instrument well ... if you have a good teacher and a willingness to learn.
The differences cited concerning mechanical skills have virtually nothing to do with learning to play music; and are only useful for the purposes of creating "believeable"excuses.

[ApK]

There is nothing inherently difficult or easy in learning to play any instrument well ... if you have a good teacher and a willingness to learn.
The differences cited concerning mechanical skills have virtually nothing to do with learning to play music; and are only useful for the purposes of creating "believeable"excuses.

I strongly disagree. There are simply more things to do and more aspects to keep in mind when trying to learn to make music on some instruments than others. You can find difficult or easy aspects in everything, but there's no way you're going to convince me that learning to play violin is as easy as playing, say, mountain dulcimer. It's good to have a realistic sense for the different level of effort and time involved, so you're not needless discouraged at your progress.

[fwoompf]

My first instrument was classical guitar and I can attest at HATING a pick at first...it really is a very precise and small movement that takes a lot of time for the muscles to get comfortable with. Eventually it was flatpicking guitar lessons that pushed me over the edge in finally getting comfortable with picking - not so much on guitar - but actually the biggest improvement was with the mandolin.

What's really interesting to me is that when I have my fingers on the strings of a guitar, as opposed to a pick, my *left* hand gets the most benefit. I'm instantly more comfortable, loose, and just generally can make more interesting sounds.

[Jonathan Peck]

One difference I've noticed is that on the mandolin, I tend to look at my fretting hand. On the violin, I tend to look at the bow - and watch my fretting hand with my ears

I'm not sure which is more difficult, but I'm finding that with each instrument, I need to approach it as a 'total beginner' and build technique at my own pace. Each require sound fundamentals to get the best tone possible.